Stellar abundances as records of stellar nucleosynthesis and galactic evolution

The history of the cosmos is written in starlight. We will develop novel means to optimally extract such information from stellar spectra, dramatically improving the accuracy to which this can be achieved. Our team brings together an internationally renowned team to study some of the major topics in contemporary astrophysics: the nature of stellar convection, the solar chemical composition, the origin of the elements and the formation and evolution of the Galaxy. The observational data will be obtained with cutting-edge facilities on the most powerful telescopes in the world such as the Very Large Telescope and Gemini. Our numerical modelling will form an integral part of the theoretical virtual observatory for future stellar analyses.